Path integration impairments reveal early cognitive changes in Subjective Cognitive Decline

Path integration, the ability to track one’s position using self-motion cues, is critically dependent on the grid cell network in the entorhinal cortex, a region vulnerable to early Alzheimer’s disease pathology. In this study, we examined path integration performance in individuals with subjective cognitive decline (SCD), a group at increased risk for Alzheimer’s disease, and healthy controls using an immersive virtual reality task. We developed a Bayesian computational model to decompose path integration errors into distinct components. SCD participants exhibited significantly higher path integration error, primarily driven by increased memory leak, while other modelling-derived error sources, such as velocity gain, sensory and reporting noise, remained comparable across groups. Our findings suggest that path integration deficits, specifically memory leak, may serve as an early marker of neurodegeneration in SCD and highlight the potential of self-motion-based navigation tasks for detecting pre-symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease-related cognitive changes.